Recent demands in the aerospace industry towards substantially improving fuel economy and extending flight range have driven accelerated use of advanced composites as primary structural materials. The next-generation airplanes will have substantial parts made of light-weight composites. This means that the engineering demands on the safety of fiber-reinforced composites will become greater. Therefore there is a need for better structural and failure analysis of composite structures.
Structural margin of safety analysis is one type of analysis for structural analysis engineers to certify the soundness of composite structures. The margin of safety analysis of composite structures includes development of specific process and analysis tools to account for the increased complexity of the failure modes of composite structures relative to traditional metallic structures.
In current existing techniques for structural analysis of repaired composite structures, composite element loads in conjunction with very conservative factors are used to analyze the margins of safety of composite structures. The current techniques assume that the composite element loads after repair are unchanged and a conservative load factor is used to cover the element load increase due to extra plies added in the repair.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to have a system and method that takes into account at least some of the issues discussed above, as well as other possible issues.